Flower Power is thirty-five-minute musical and visual exploration about optimism, idealism, psychedelia, breaking with convention, and a little bit of love and peace. Julia writes: “My recent large-scale works have addressed important moments in American history. The same is true for Flower Power, though it has no text. As a post-60s child, I experienced the afterglow of the 1960s revolution. And the after-ring was still resounding in the late 1970s. There was a sense that a better world was possible. In the strange moment we are in now, ‘when all the world is a hopeless jumble,’ I think about that remarkable turning point in American history, and in American music – a time of new ideas, and hope. Flower Power draws on my memory of this political and artistic time period, harnessing the energy and power of liberation and activism.”

Flower Power combines the rock-infused compositional style Wolfe developed with the Bang on a Can All-Stars, the force of a full orchestra, and visual accompaniment by Jeff Sugg, who previously collaborated with Wolfe on her works Fire in my mouth and Anthracite Fields.

Flower Power was commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Danish National Symphony Orchestra.

– Bang on a Can All-Stars